Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Every Second Breakpoint
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Domino Loop
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

The Puzzle Marathon is always my favorite! It is so nice to be able to finish all the puzzles and get credit, and I love the big grids. The puzzles this year were very nice again, though nothing stood out as a particularly hard one .. I would rate most as easy or medium. And so I was mostly frustrated with myself for breaking each of the ESB, Galaxy, Futoshiki, Neighbors, Pentopia (I broke that one about 5 times, but it was one of my favorites nevertheless), and LITS+. Sigh. But a big thank you as always to the puzzles makers!!

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Spiral Galaxy
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Twin Co-Ordinates
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Every single puzzle was excellently constructed, and even more impressively the difficulty seemed well-balanced between all twelve. I also thought that all of the rules changes for this year were for the best. Great job, everyone involved!

Puzzle Marathon for 2016 is over. Submission is no more allowed.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Word Search Sudoku
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	A bit skewed
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Average
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

We thought it'd be nice to acknowledge some of the Marathon Solvers. There is some criteria for this list - We didn't consider solvers going more than 2 hours on a single puzzle, because they might have taken a break mid-puzzle. Also, the total accumulated break time in between solving is equal to or less than an hour.

I guess I should post a few comments about my puzzle (Linked Poset Futoshiki).

Congratulations for deu for solving Linked Poset Futoshiki the fastest at 12:29. Further congratulations for deu that has also won the entire Marathon. Also congratulations for Kota (15:50) and EKBM (16:03) as the podium finishers, along with those below 20 minutes.

Among the people so far that have posted their feedback publicly on this thread, 13 out of 49 liked Linked Poset Futoshiki. Since that's close enough to 1/4, I suppose I take it as good enough that my puzzle competes in the average. (I didn't actually count the others, so I'm not sure if there's any outlier).



Yes, this is unfortunate, and I apologize for that. I did have NEW, HUGE, AND CHALLENGING! that was hosted a month ago (about a hellishly difficult 16x16 Poset Futoshiki, but it also contains 6 practice Poset Futoshiki puzzles), but I think I forgot to remind people here to check it to practice Poset Futoshiki. (The linked part should be easier to understand.) For this particular question, I should probably have made a 2x4x4 example instead of a 2x3x3 one.



I suppose it's no longer useful now that the Marathon has ended, but the answer below that post is correct. In a regular Poset Futoshiki (see above link), a puzzle is made of a grid and its associated diagram. In this puzzle, the diagrams haven't been associated to the grids; rule 1 in your numbering is to associate them (so each diagram is associated to one grid in each row/column).



A poset is usually represented as a Hasse diagram, which is exactly what you see: if there is a path from a lower number to a higher number that is going strictly upward, then the lower number is smaller than the higher number (and if there is no such path, then the two are incomparable). I chose to remain with this convention. On retrospect, it probably would have helped to remove the arrow heads and telling that lower number is smaller than higher number instead.



Yes, I probably should have linked NEW, HUGE, AND CHALLENGING! as described above, so that people can familiarize themselves with Poset Futoshiki first before going into the linked part.

Very nice set of puzzles. After missing last two years Puzzle Marathon, it was very nice and enjoyable experience for me. All the puzzles were very nice and has logical solution. Finding the same co-ordinates turns out to be very tough puzzle for me. Thanks to all the authors and LMI for this puzzle test.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Akari
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hex Slitherlink
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Every Second Breakpoint
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	LITS+
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Every Second Breakpoint
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Twin Co-Ordinates
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

When will the solution booklet be posted? After looking through that Twin Coordinates puzzle for such a long time and only finding 3 out of 6 pairs, I'm curious as to where the last few were.

All authors have been kind enough to send me the solutions, so I should be able to compile them, hopefully soon. Here is the solution of Twin Co-Ordinates.

There were few comments about including Twin Co-Ordinates in Marathon. Here are my thoughts on that topic.



I believe that visual puzzles are part of WPC-style puzzles, though they have been under represented in most contests / championships. If I have to pick couple of examples, the first one will be Puzzle GP finals 2015. There was a Find The Pair puzzle, which is similar to what we had here in Marathon. USPC has a visual puzzle every year worth 5 or 10 points, and similarly we have been trying to add visual puzzles in IPC for last 3-4 years. So I do not certainly feel Twin Co-ordinates puzzle was out of place in Marathon.

I also think Tawan did a wonderful job with the puzzle. While being less logical than others, you can also make step-by-step progress with this particular puzzle. Rohan has pointed that out in an earlier post. Have attached his partially solved solution to show what it means.



We also took extra precaution and asked for only 5 pairs, because we realized that it could sometimes be very frustrating to find all six. I would think that worked really well, which helped the puzzle be at almost similar difficulty as other puzzle. 185 players submitted this one successfully, out of which 112 got bonus. [ See statistics below to know which pair was the most difficult to find ]



When we (including Tawan) decided to include this type in marathon, we didn't expect to receive all positive feedback for the puzzle. That is exactly what happened, but I am glad that it made to top 3 favourite puzzle of several solvers.

Tawan, feel free to add your thoughts.

The authors get lot of credit for this. All authors were very accommodating and designed / agreed to adjust the difficulty level as per our requirements. We had four authors who even decided to write completely new puzzles because the difficulty level did not match with other puzzles. We already have seen one of them here in NEW, HUGE, AND CHALLENGING. I would like to thank all the authors again.

One puzzle - I would like to highlight - that lost bit of it aesthetics is the Neighbours. It had a perfect 12 clues across the diagonal, but we realized it is little too tough, so 4 clues got added at the end. The original version is pasted at the end of this post. [ The pdf file already has both the versions now. ] Thanks James for agreeing to distort this one.

We also got to add couple of clues to Domino Loop and Spiral Galaxy. Their original versions will be uploaded.

It was not mentioned in the IB, but the test solvers for this contest were Palmer Mebane and Rohan Rao. Thanks both of you. It certainly helps to have a top solver like Palmer as a test-solver, we could be very confident about the difficulty level of the puzzles before finalizing.

Original Neigbhours Version

(Emerges from hiding)

Looking at early WPCs and USPCs, visual puzzles have always been there. WPCs aren't limited to just logic puzzles - as long as they're language-neutral its fair game right? Which is also why I welcome the Casual section of the Puzzle GP with open arms.

So even if I feel visual puzzles deserve their place in these competitions - I won't try to argue about them being logical, cause I feel they're not. With this specific puzzle though, I did attempt to make it more methodological by adding areas where you can cross out to narrow down to the solution.

Initially there was a choice between a word or a visual puzzle. I sent Deb a list of potential candidates (list included scrabble, word search, spot the differences etc) and given the marathon format and the online medium - we decided on the Twins. For this particular fairy tale-themed puzzle (not culture-neutral?) I spent 2 three-hour sessions drawing it up on MS Paint. This is probably the most time (just under 6 hours total) I've ever spent making one puzzle. (Bonus points: can you name the stories where all the characters came from?)

The puzzle had two versions: the black/white one (that you solved) and one with colours (actually just different shades of gray) which should be somewhat easier. After seeing one solver guessing 231(!) times, I felt like hiding from LMI until the marathon was over. Congrats to Nishinanntoka who amazingly finish in just over 10 minutes.

As a competitor, I'm glad to snatch one first place in Sudoku from the Japanese solvers :). Also enjoyed the Futoshiki, Slitherlink was surprisingly fun and impressed at how James managed the LMI theme on the heavily-constrained Neighbours puzzle.

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Every Second Breakpoint
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Neighbours
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Perfectly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Fair

Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Linked Poset Futoshiki
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Hidoku
Your 3 most favorite puzzles of the contest.	Pentopia
How balanced do you think the puzzle types of this test were?	Fairly balanced
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
What is your opinion about rules, points and scoring for this test?	Very fair

I enjoyed the puzzles, but didn't have time to finish all of them. It felt slightly easier than previous marathon sets.